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The quest for anything else that would fit took months. The narrow little notch the starter has to fit in only allows a starter that's about 2.5 inches in diameter. The Super Starter only fit because it's an offset pinion gear reduction starter, which pushes the bulky motor way off to one side where there's room.
After a series of dead ends, including searches for small-diameter starters for Japanese mini trucks and Harleys, and offset gear reduction starters for reverse-rotation V8s in twin-engine boats, we finally stumbled onto PNG Rebuiders, a one-man starter rebuild shop right down the street that's known for finding starters for goofy oddball things like discontinued forklifts and Hayabusa-powered Miatas.
Nathan (the one man in the starter shop) listened to our sob story and reached into his bucket of busted starters. First try was this Denso starter from a Bobcat. You can see the blue line Tim scribed on the adaptor plate to indicate where the starter pinion would have to sit to line up with the ring gear. The Bobcat starter (which also looks surprisingly similar to a 1986 Toyota Camry starter — don't ask how I know) is temptingly close, but can't qiute sit level and hit the line at the same time.
Next up was this Hitachi starter. Look familiar? It is, in fact, mostly the same as the Tilton Super Starter, only with the discontinued gear pitch we were looking for.
And the gear sits perfectly on the ring gear line.
Since the Hitachi starter was dead, we swapped the pinion gear into the Super Starter, and got to work aligning the starter. In this photo, the nose of the starter has been removed. The nose is the piece that determines how the starter will bolt up to the engine. The Tilton nose was designed for flexibility to mount to several different engines, but this made it very bulky. The nose that came on our Hitachi starter was also rather large. With no nose at all, the starter tucks neatly in place.
Another reason the nose had to go was because the starter solenoid's throw is designed for mounting to the bellhousing, so the stack up of the starter nose and the extra inch of adaptor plate was going to push the starter too far back.
